Andrei Makine - Once Upon The River Love

I looked at this woman in perplexity. There she was entering the room, and she was coming from quite a different era. From before the snowstorm… Suddenly I remembered that there had been the sunny promenade beside the sea, the shark, the underground chamber with the chained beauty… I felt myself reeling. Without explaining anything to my aunt, I left the room and pushed open the front door.

The evening sun was drowsing behind the castellated skyline of the taiga, caught in the watchtowers' invisible trap. Thanks to the purplish haze from the mild spell, you could stare at the coppery disk without screwing up your eyes. And the disk, I was sure, was swaying slightly above the barbed wire…

Next day when Samurai knocked on our door and said to me with a wink: "Let's go!" there was no mistaking what he proposed.

We put on our snowshoes, collected Utkin close by his izba, and left Svetlaya…

The city, twenty-three miles by road, was nineteen if you cut through the taiga. Eight hours on the march, plus a couple of stops to have a bite to eat and especially to give Utkin a breather. An entire day's journey. At the end of it: a sunset and the mists of the city that lay between two arms of the taiga, where it opened out gradually. And closer and closer came the hour, which each time became more magical: six-thirty P.M. The evening performance. Belmondo's.

Already the dense taiga was opening out; our snowy road was leading us straight to that promenade beside the sea and into the midst of that tanned crowd of extraterrestrials in the Western World…

The first time, we had understood little. And indeed, there were things in the film it was hard for us to comprehend. The character of the publisher, for example. His relationship with our hero was an absolute mystery to us. Why was Belmondo afraid of this obese, inelegant man who hid his baldness under a wig? What dominion could he exercise over our superman and by what right? How dared he carelessly cast aside the manuscript that our hero brought him in his office?

For want of any credible explanation, we concluded it was sexual rivalry. And indeed, the hero's lovely neighbor was the target of repeated assaults by this monstrous literary bureaucrat. The whole audience held its breath when, drooling with lust, he feasted his prying eyes on the delectable backside of the young woman as she rashly leaned a little too far over the desk. And it was he who later pounced on the unfortunate woman, scattering his thick-lipped kisses all over her body when her defenses were down as a result of a treacherous drugged cigarette…

Many of the nuances in this film escaped us. But thanks to our sixth sense, as young savages from the taiga, we could perceive intuitively what intellectually we could not know about the lives of Westerners. And we had decided to see the film ten or twenty times over if need be, but to understand everything! Everything down to the detail that tortured us for several days: when the lovely creature called on our hero, who was evidently a most welcoming host, why did she refuse his offer of a glass of whiskey?

We saw the film seventeen times. In fact, we no longer watched it, we lived in it. Having once tiptoed our way warily onto the sunny promenade, we now set about exploring the most intimate nooks and crannies of this secret world. The plot was learned by heart. Now we could allow ourselves to study its surroundings and its backdrops: A piece of furniture in the hero's apartment – some little cupboard whose use was unknown, which the director himself very likely never noticed. A bend in the road, which the cameraman had framed without attaching the least importance to it. Or the reflection of a gray Parisian spring morning on the long thigh of the lovely neighbor, asleep half naked in front of our hero's door. Oh, that reflection! For us it became the eighth color of the rainbow; the one most necessary to the chromatic harmony of the world.

But above all, Belmondo… He embodied this whole complex repertoire of adventures, colors, passionate embraces, roars, leaps, kisses, breaking waves, musky scents, brushes with death. He was the key to this magic universe, its fulcrum, its engine. Its god…

We grasped the reason for his quicksilver performance. Indeed. He lived at this furious pace, embarking on a new action sequence before he had finished the last one, because he strove to achieve divine omnipresence. To bring together through his muscular and supple body all the elements of the universe. To become the very substance of their fusion. Like a human blender, he mixed an intoxicating cocktail from the dazzling spray of the waves, the sensual pulp of feminine bodies, lovers' panting, war cries, tropical languor, triumphant biceps, and a host of characters created with the titanic fecundity of the pagan gods: good, evil, droll, sensitive, eccentric, falsely tender, perverse, myth-omaniac…

He was a celestial clockmaker, who wound up the giant watch spring of this mind-blowing universe, set the southern sun and the languid stars on their courses. And his boxer's lungs breathed life into every soul that revolved around him. The carousel gathered speed, the cascading action sequences were transformed into a burlesque Niagara. And we were carried along on its torrent.

There were nevertheless times when our hero, while in full amorous and military cry, would suddenly stop and choose to be solitary, sad, misunderstood. Like a god in the midst of his creation when it no longer has need of him… Then a moment later he would fly off into the sky, attached to some fiery helicopter. But we who were tucked away in an obscure corner of his universe had glimpsed that moment of melancholy and solitude…

The process of exploring the Western World continued, with its setbacks and its victories. One day we finally succeeded in defining the role of the publisher. He was classified: an evil man whose sexual appetite bore no relation to his physical and intellectual insignificance, a being who preyed on the noblest human gift, the capacity to dream.

This discovery coincided with another one, three or four showings later. We solved the mystery of the doubling of Belmondo!

The coming and going between the luxurious villas frequented by the master spy and the writer's modest apartment; between the athlete with a sunburned body and the slave to the typewriter who is more or less depressive and ravaged by nicotine addiction – this disconcerting alternation finally yielded its secret. And it was the glamorous spy who greatly assisted our investigation.

For she, too, was quite ambiguous. Chained to the wall of the underground chamber, she struggled; her struggling was highly provocative. Her tattered dress was on the brink of spilling out a magnificent breast into the lubricious palm of the transmogrified publisher. A superb breast, destined for a sadistic mastectomy. Her emerald eyes, admirably slanting, were those of a captured antelope. Her body had the aerodynamic curves of that noble animal. Her abundant hair rippled over her bare shoulders. The sadist approached, brandishing his blade, and we almost regretted that the hero's chains had yielded so quickly. Another moment, and the publisher-executioner would have stripped the marvelous antelope's body of those useless rags…

It took us at least ten showings before we began to recognize the features of the antelope in the appearance of the rather pale student who lived in the same apartment building as the writer. This remote prototype for the glamorous spy, this pale shadow, was seen m a very humdrum setting of rainy days in Paris – a tall girl in jeans, her generous outlines erased, flattened out. A thick sweater camouflaged all hint of curves, eliminated all trace of sensuality. Her serious student's glasses dulled the sparkle in her eyes. And yet it was still she, our antelope with the shapely and muscular buttocks, our spy whose heaving bosom swelled full and round beneath the tatters of her dress.